Proof that Illegals Are Not Taking Jobs From Americans...

Discussion in 'Immigration' started by OldManOnFire, Sep 28, 2010.

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  1. Whale

    Whale Banned

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    Here's another example of someone with an apparently very poor education.

    Who told you that we didn't export goods prior to nafta?
     
  2. BuckNaked

    BuckNaked New Member

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    You are talking about farm jobs, seasonal at best, part time for the most part. Have you ever worked on a farm or ranch? When there is work that needs to be done they can work you 24/7 without paying any over time, if you could hold up for it. Many of these guys work 14-18 a day for a few days, maybe a week or two. $10 in this economy is poverty level. I worked at a cotton gin in my early days (mid 70's) making $8.50 an hour (take home), and my rent was $150.00 for a three bedroom house. SEASONAL, 8-12 weeks at best. When they run out of work, you become a trespasser, move along! Then I worked as a bricklayer/carpenters helper for $7.50-$8.50 an hour until I went into the military.

    The same cotton gin I worked at today pays a hand full of white people with families min wage or a dollar more, and the rest of the workers are wetbacks living in chicken coops and hay barns getting $20-25 a day when they need them. When they are done with them they move on, and a new set arrive next season. That's why Americans don't take those jobs, they cannot make a living doing them the way they could 30 years ago.

    Something has got to give, but the cost of living either has to go down or the wages need to go up. The only way that will happen is for the rich to accept a pay cut, and we both know that isn't going to happen, so I guess we are doomed. Monopolies control the markets, we don't make anything any more, and even if everybody was the valedictorian and all got masters degrees, there are not enough of those jobs to sustain our existence either.

    So I guess it is those lazy poor peoples fault simply because they will not cooperate and accept hard work and low pay they cannot live on??? :rolleyes:
     
  3. OldManOnFire

    OldManOnFire Well-Known Member

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    It's interesting your perspective. You talk about wage disparities between the wealthy and others, and your solution is for the wealthy to take a pay cut, instead of a solution of obtaining more education and working hard to achieve more? How can the wealthier people possibly be a solution for the poorer people? Every single one of us have choices in life and we make our decisions about which path we wish to take. If we don't like 'our' path, then 'we' need to change 'our' path.

    No matter what you feel, the least skilled people are going to be doing the least skilled jobs which pay less...this is a fact of life which cannot be changed with politics and stealing from the wealthy. Nothing has changed since I was a young adult and it didn't take long for me to realize that if I wanted more then I needed to learn more to increase my value. Whining, and blaming others, and wanting others to solve 'our' problems, will get people nowhere fast!

    I suppose if you were consulting with a high school student today you would share all your negativity and pessimism in your post above...and what positive purpose would this serve? Why wouldn't you help the student understand that more education and hard work are the actions to take to find personal growth and higher incomes?

    I always say each of us have choices in life to do great or mediocre. Mediocre decisions will bring us a mediocre life with a mediocre income. It's our choice...
     
  4. BuckNaked

    BuckNaked New Member

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    It's the cost of doing business. If a piece of material goes up the price is paid, and profits take a loss or you raise the price of the merchandise. If the cost of living goes up, lazy people need to work harder??? OK we've about stomped that lie into the dirt.
     
     
    The rest of your post is straw man baloney, but I enjoyed reading the fairy tale anyway. :wink:
     
  5. sunnyside

    sunnyside Well-Known Member

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    Alright, before you were just willfully misinterpriting what I'd said. Now you're just making stuff up.

    Are you just trolling here, or can't you keep posters straight?

    I never said anything about that, if anything I support locking down the border.

    My comment was that I didn't approve of people collecting unemployment and welfare while ignoring jobs in other areas.





    Grew up on one actually. Though it was a family farm, and so it'd be rather different than your cotton gin experience.


    Is that actually true? I'm dubious. I'm talking about legal workers here.

    Ok, so that's probably roughly analagous to what rates are today, presuming you had to pay utilities on the house back then. How well do you feel you got by then?

    You're right about the seasonal part though. However about the time agri jobs shut down the high schoolers and college kids are heading back to class, and retail may be ramping up hiring.

    Packing plants (the equivalent sort of job where I'm from) are much more regular.

    The other and better option is to change the jobs.

    Consider if at some point in time someone was saying the same thing about harvesting wheat by hand with a scyth. The options aren't just to pay the reapers more or somehow mysteriously to make things cheaper. The good answer is to instead use a harvester.

    Somebody mentioned that there are only so many jobs for the skilled and educated, which at any point in time is true. However the number isn't constant and grows with the supply of workers. The number of such jobs today is vastly larger than it was a hundred years ago.

    Granted there are always some people who are going to be unskilled. But we're also always going to need waiters and cashiers and such.

    I'm just saying that what we don't want to try to do is increase the number of unskilled workers. Rather we want to increase the number of skilled workers.
     
  6. BuckNaked

    BuckNaked New Member

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    So am I. Jobs categorized as farm and ranch, have different rules since the work is seasonal for the most part. They can work you as many hours as they can to get the work done in a hurry, especially harvesting.
     
     
     
    Where do laborers make 4 times what the minimum wage is? Better yet where do you rent a 3 bedroom house for $150.00 a month (today the same house I rented back then is over $800.00 per month?? Bread was 8 loaves for a $1, Utilities for the entire month including trash pickup and cable TV was less than $90.00, a house that big today would have a utility bill of over $250 or more a month. A new vehicle was 10 times less than it is today. Now that we have placed it in perspective, how do you figure it is comparable to today's wages/cost???
     

     
     
    Which is the curent trend to eliminate the worker all together, or more to the point eliminate the American worker from the economic equation, WHO NEEDS MORE TO SURVIVE ON SINCE THE COST OF LIVING THAT SOCIETY HAS ESTABLISHED CONTINUES TO RISE EVEN THOUGH WORKING CLASS WAGES/PAY IS STAGNATING AND HAS BEEN FOR OVER 4 DECADES. What we don't need is more government subsidies to accommodate substandard wages or their participation in creating an alternative slave labor force that doesn't contribute to the economy except in the way of creating unnatural profits for the rich/elites (royalty).
     
     
    At the moment we have areas with 50% drop out rates, the education that is provided publicly is for the most part substandard, last time I looked less than 30% of the population had the opportunity to attend institutions of higher learning, and a large number of them cannot find work in their chosen career. So obviously it is unrealistic to declare if people were more educated they could find better paying jobs. Some would, but for the most part there would be a bunch of well educated individuals eligible for food stamps because the job (and in most cases “jobs“) they have doesn't pay enough for them to survive on.
     
     
    People have to start somewhere, everybody isn't born with a silver spoon sticking out of every orifice, which means entry level, and (a word used to demonize and vilify) "unskilled" labor (might as well say unworthy, undeserving peasant subhuman’s) positions that can sustain their existence so they can improve their situation. This ridiculous notion that work is a 4 letter word, the days of an honest days work for an honest days pay are no more. Trying to rationalize it away won't eliminate the problem this country is facing.

    Can we discuss reality or is that not in style any more either??
     
  7. OldManOnFire

    OldManOnFire Well-Known Member

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  8. Whale

    Whale Banned

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    Clueless.

    How can anyone be that mathematically challenged?
    It demonstrates the sad state of education in the United States for even the least cognizant to figure that $10.50 today will buy you what $8.50 did in the 1970's.

    Oh Lord.

    This is why politicians today can get away with murder, we have hoards of people in this country who can barely tie their own shoes.
     
  9. BuckNaked

    BuckNaked New Member

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    And people who take statements completely out of context, and run with it is why there are so many delusional people running around.


    Perfect example, doctors. You can have the grades, you can even accumulate/acquire the funding to attend but the schools are limited to the needs of the AMA, so that the career of being a doctor remains lucrative and the market isn‘t over run by qualified physicians. Which means out of all the people qualified to become a doctor, many will be flat out rejected, talent or not.
     
     
    My point in a nut shell, before someone insisted I was anti education is, there are only so many positions available, which is the same reason "everybody" can't be a farmer, or "everybody" cannot be a nuclear physicist, or everybody cannot be an over paid celebrity/jock/teleprompter reader, simply because there is a limit to any and every job.
     
     
    I'm not saying that you shouldn't make academics a important aspect of your life and you know that isn‘t the point I was making, but if "everybody" achieved academic bliss, that would only mean that the majority of the people working at wallyworld would be, over qualified, since they would be working below their education level, unable to find a position in their chosen career.
     
     
    You wish to discuss absurdities that is fine, but stop misrepresenting the facts that I am conveying.
     
     
    Society is made of many different working classes, what we have today is a deserving class (about 2% of the entire population) and then there is everybody else who is undeserving even thought the majority of them work harder in a day than most of that 2% work in the entire year, and that is what is wrong with the mindset of our nation. If it continues we will fail, big time!!
     
  10. BuckNaked

    BuckNaked New Member

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    Pretty much it in a nut shell. :nod:
     
  11. SiliconMagician

    SiliconMagician Banned

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    No, the mind set of our nation is that we don't want to be a manufacturing exporter anymore. We don't want our people doing crap jobs like ants in an antfarm moving widgets too and fro.

    We have to advance beyond that sort of economy and move into something completely new. We are moving into a new form of cutthroat capitalism. One based on finance, investment and high tech biomedical and communications, etc..

    That "new" capitalist economy is going to be harsher, more competitive than ever in human history. More Darwinian than ever. Our children will have to plan their lives out carefully almost from the beginning and follow through. There is a term that's been coined for this: "The one strike economy". Get pregnant as a teen, get locked up in jail, drop out of school.. you are done. No chance to ever recover probably. life sentence to drudge work and misery.

    This is reality and nothing can change it. It's the result of technological advances in the last 20 years. We're all going to have to become more machine like, less emotional and more pragmatic about our jobs and our lives.

    So how do we address this issue? The left wants to enact socialism for the losers in life. But eventually that number will be so great in America that the few taxpayers left are going to balk at the rates necessary to feed those who Capitalism forgot. I refuse to live in a society that demands 50% or more of my paycheck to take care of those who are physically fit, but mentally unable to do work in the 21st century.
     
  12. BuckNaked

    BuckNaked New Member

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    Do you even understand what capitalism is??

    So in your future everybody is a God (and by everybody I mean the upper rich/elite), except the people who are, well human? That's why this country is failing now!

    The world you are talking about is unobtainable, unrealistic, and intellectually dishonest, and that thinking is exactly what has destroyed our economic stability for the last 3-4 decades, as the deserving class have set the standard by excluding the majority of the population, while they have profited while they trickled down upon the less worthy. What this creates is the economically bankrupt society we have today.

    What we need to do is step back take a deep breath and figure out how we as a nation can be a productive, "STABALIZED", economic nation, once again. Your way will completely finish off an already financially unstable, politically corrupt, mentally deranged, guaranteed to remain an economically crippled nation.
     
  13. BullsLawDan

    BullsLawDan New Member

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    Exactly. Quite frankly, I find the entire discussion regarding farm labor to be moronic. Why are Americans engaging in xenophobia and thinly-veiled bigotry to "protect" jobs that require hours of backbreaking labor, sometimes literally up to your waist in horse(*)(*)(*)(*), for menial wages?

    Those are the jobs you want to protect? That's what you want your children doing for their career?

    Any job done by unskilled labor will eventually be replaced by machinery. Never enter a field of work where the only thing stopping you from being replaced by a machine is the fact that no one's invented the machine yet.

    Unskilled, illegal workers will never be a threat to anyone who is skilled in the important facets of our economy.

    My standard of living with a professional career is good, and that standard is magnified when the price of necessary goods goes down. On a dollar-for-dollar basis, increasing wages of Americans has the same effect on their standard of living as decreasing prices, because a standard of living is built on net purchasing power.

    So, yeah, tell your kids to fight for those horrible, low-paying farm jobs. Me, I'll make sure my children are in highly skilled trades or professional careers, like my wife and I, and I'll continue to enjoy inexpensive commodities produced by inexpensive labor.
     
  14. jthorp24

    jthorp24 New Member

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    So you don't think there are ANY Americans who would take these jobs? If there is one job that an ILLEGAL alien takes from a US CITIZEN... that is a problem.
     
  15. sunnyside

    sunnyside Well-Known Member

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    Ran the numbers through an inflation calculator. Looks like the multiplier from 1972 to 2009 is about five. Higher than I thought.

    What was throwing me was that the three bedroom house neighboring me when I group up is renting for $200 a month (utilities paid). However after poking around I think that might be low. Still, 800 would be high for rural Iowa.

    Still though I'm surprised. So you're say that at that point in time you were getting paid something the equivalent of $30-40 dollars an hour for work a fresh high school dropout could have just sat down and performed?

    Perhaps there has been a more fundamental change.  

     
    I decided to wander over to US census bureau and check in on that and looked at the numbers for my age bracket (30-34)

    Only 12% of us didn't get a high school diploma, 43% of us did get some advanced degree, while 18% of us went to college but didn't see it through.

    Although that doesn't mean at all that the 57% that didn't get a degree are unskilled menial laborers. For example I know a number of people who would fit in there, but who are doing fine having gotten a computer engineering/science job before they'd graduated, learned to be a mechanic, took over the farm, or joined the armed forces. One actually did go up the chain from burger monky at a McDonals to a management spot.

    They aren't. The days of dropping out of high school and straight away getting a good job may be.



    You mentioned the Wally world workers.

    Note that even they are being replaced. These days when I buy something, I typically use one of the self scanning stations where a half dozen such stations are being operated by a single worker.

    In all cases really, the menial worker is at risk of replacement. Perhaps illegals and trade agreements are depressing wages, however you're also competing with robots.

    However the flip side of that is that while at any given point in time there are only so many "better" jobs, there are ever increasing numbers of them. And this is in part fueled by the availibility of peope with the right skills. For example I'm a computer engineer. There are lots of us now, how many do you think there were back when you were working on the cotten gin?

    Further there is a lot of flexibility in many modern degrees. Actually there are many white collar jobs out there today where the degree you have almost doesn't matter. The employer just wants to know that you have what it takes to earn a degree and have that essential level of proficiancy with reading, writing, math, and science.

     
    Nah. There is still a significant middle class that's living quite well. The median household income in this country is $44,389, and over 15% are in the six figures terrtory.

    I don't see how you can get more machine like with a job than the assembly line workers.

    However I don't buy the one strike economy bit. It isn't a race. If you drop out of high school, even if you're just flipping burgers you can get a GED, and move forward from there. If you get pregnant as a teen you always have the adoption angle, and even beyond that I know a number of people who have turned stuff like that around.

    And I know many more who didn't spend all their time effeciently.

    However I expect statistically it'd LOOK like a "one strike economy". The reason being that for every person who drops out of high school, gets thrown into the slammer, and than turns their life around, there will be a bunch who are just losers and that's why they dropped out and got thrown in jail.
     
  16. OldManOnFire

    OldManOnFire Well-Known Member

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  17. OldManOnFire

    OldManOnFire Well-Known Member

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  18. OldManOnFire

    OldManOnFire Well-Known Member

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  19. Whale

    Whale Banned

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    I've read this entire thread the title of which is:
    There's one problem....after 5 pages I still haven't seen this supposed proof.
    Instead we've seen proof of the opposite...subsidized illegals driving wages below the level that legal citizens can afford to work.

    Do me a favor and PM me when you decide to get around to showing us this proof.
     
  20. sunnyside

    sunnyside Well-Known Member

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    Actually those aren't opposites, they could in fact be complimentary.

    It's quite possible entire job sectors in certain locations exist because the illegals depress the wages to the point where it's worth it to create those jobs, making openings that citizens don't want to fill.
     
  21. BullsLawDan

    BullsLawDan New Member

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    Are you arguing for or against me?

    What I'm saying is we have three choices: Raise food prices drastically, move food production offshore, or continue hiring low cost labor.

    I'm saying the third choice is by far the most attractive and makes the most sense, because it involves the least restriction and the most free market solution.

    On the contrary. I grew up on a dirt road in a farming community. My entire community was dependent on a wide variety of farming for survival. We had dairy, pig, corn, soy, and potato all within walking distance of my home.

    I paid my way to college from my earnings as a farm laborer, which I started at the age of 13.

    The Pennsylvania Dutch (Deutsch) farmers are the dominant cultural group in my area growing up.

    In engineering school, I worked on what was, at the time, the best attempt to build an automated apple picker. It was unsuccessful, reiterating the need for manual labor on upstate NY's apple orchards.

    I volunteered during law school with our local farmworkers' legal services agency.

    And today, in Upstate NY, I support my local farming community. About half of our family's produce is purchased through our local CSA and comes from within 10 miles of our house (almost all of our produce from May-October, as well as much of our supermarket produce, thanks to Wegmans' excellent buying practices.).

    So when I talk about farming, I speak from a varied experience.

    Lawyer. Doctor. Nurse. Teacher. Auto Mechanic. Pilot.

    There are many.

    It's pathetic to make sure your children have success in life? You have a different idea of parenting than I do.

    But some jobs are menial. That's not an opinion, menial is an adjective that accurately describes many jobs.

    Like I said, I will just raise my children to understand that there is an immense importance to be satisfied in your career, because it allows for so much other happiness.

    An important part of that is to not pick a career where your job security is constantly threatened by offshoring or by technological obsolescence. I am reinforcing that all the time.

    I do, all the time. In my job, at home, with my children. Intellectual stimulation is extremely important.
     
  22. OldManOnFire

    OldManOnFire Well-Known Member

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    Try reading the OP on page 1.

    How are 'illegals' subsidized?

    Are 'illegals' driving wages below the minimum wages set by federal and state governments?

    You obviously have some magical number in your brain that you consider to be an acceptable wage so "citizens can afford to work". What is your magic number?
     
  23. OldManOnFire

    OldManOnFire Well-Known Member

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    Look...I'm paying $15/hour for mostly unskilled labor and this is well above the minimum wage guidelines. 95% of our work is part-time work. I don't see where any particular group is 'depressing' wages. What I see are millions of Americans and illegals and green cards with very low job skills and this combined group of millions are keeping unskilled type work labor at low prices.

    For those who believe hanging drywall or whatever are skilled positions...you are wrong. The only way they can be skilled positions is if they require some minimum education and/or experience. Something that can be learned in a few days is not skilled...
     
  24. RPA1

    RPA1 Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    OldManOnFire wrote:
    Illegals have flooded the construction trade in CA. Framers, drywallers etc. These were good paying jobs for American citizens that are unavailable now. Skilled or unskilled these were good jobs for American citizens.
     
  25. OldManOnFire

    OldManOnFire Well-Known Member

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